Nina Campbell Reflects on the Design Industry's Changes—and Her Own

Believe it or not, interior decoration once was a village rather than a metropolis. So Nina Campbell, the London decorator, reminds me in a conversation about her new book Nina Campbell Interior Design: Elegance and Ease (Rizzoli, $60), which features residential and commercial projects that she’s completed over the last five years, among them a viewing pavilion at Ascot.

"You didn’t have showrooms with everything at your fingertips,” she says, in a tone that seems to appreciate the design world’s advances but regret the lessening of the personal touch. Back when a 19-year-old Campbell went to work for British doyen John Fowler of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, a decorator or a decorator’s assistant would go to a craftsman’s studio, tell him precisely how she wanted a fringe created, and then could watch a sample being made for approval on what she describes a “clanking wood contraption in a setting right out of Dickens. It was wonderful to have had that experience,” she adds. “Everything was unbelievably bespoke.” That village-like aspect of decades ago extended to one’s client base, too, she adds, meaning, in her case, it was largely English.

That was then, this is now. Though HG put a beaming Campbell on the cover of its English-theme issue in 1992 as an alluring avatar of all things utterly Anglo—thanks to headline-making clients such as the newlywed Duke and Duchess of York—today she’s an international presence with commissions that bestride continents and cultures. She has vibrant fabric and wallpaper collections, a tempting online shop stocked with every home accessory one could imagine (a chic fireplace-matches holder fashioned of stitched leather, anyone?), furniture galore, a daughter (Rita Konig) who follows in her inventive footsteps, and a parade of toothsome books that not only assiduously record her work but bear eloquent and inspiring witness to its evolution.

An assortment of rooms from Campbell's career.

Photo: Courtesy of Rizzoli

Elasticity may be the best work to describe Campbell’s oeuvre and her outlook. The 240-page Elegance and Ease, suavely written by Giles Kimes, the interiors editor of Country Life magazine, makes a persuasive case that as the world and the industry has changed, so has Campbell. She can turn out a perfectly calibrated take on English-country-house style as easily as she can create a sensational, sapphire-blue Manhattan entrance hall where the floor is inlaid with stars and the walls papered with a outré pattern of gondolas, a brilliant scheme that brings to mind a kicky, contemporary spin on 1930s glamour. Always, though, Campbell explains, her projects aren’t meant to be whole-cloth inventions.

"A Qatari sheikh doesn’t live the same way that a client in the English countryside lives," she observes, noting that even the scale of a decorator’s work has changed since she first worked for Fowler. "You rarely redid a whole house. You tended to re-do a drawing room if it started looking a bit shabby but not the whole house as people do today. You worked with what a client already had rather than having a blank canvas. So if the curtains had faded, you’d add a dyed border to get a few more years’ life."

A New York City study of Campbell's design.

Photo: Joshua McHugh

Interiors are for people, and, she rightly points out, people usually have possessions that could or must be used and which go a long way to adding layers of history and intimacy to the finished scheme, however much it erases the decor that came before. A case in point is Schlosshotel Kronberg, a 1889 baronial pile in Germany that, back when it was Schloss Friedrichshof, was home of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Vicky, and her husband, Emperor Frederick II. (It’s still owned by the English monarch’s descendants.) Campbell dressed up the heavily paneled property in boldly patterned fabrics, carpeting of her own design, and more than a few sleights of hand, painting this or camouflaging that, as she would if, say, you asked her to do up your own place. “There were wonderful things and not so wonderful things,” she observes, “but even the not-so-wonderful things had character. If everything’s at the same level, the result would be rather boring, don’t you think? The goal is a home, not a showroom."

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The takeaway? Don’t overthink any space. Campbell says she never plans a room down to the last cushion and then just installs it. “Decorating should be like adding pepper or any other spice,” she explains. “A room always needs a bit of that at the end, when you look it over and realize that a wonderful tablecloth is needed over there or something like that, which is what John Fowler always did. Sometimes an odd tablecloth is just the thing to lift it all.”

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